Bananas: "Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil"

We last saw the Malayalam star Prithviraj Sukumaran but a month ago, giving one of the performances of the year so far as the everyman sold into modern slavery in the very fine but exacting epic Aadujeevitham. So Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil clearly presents as light relief, for him as for us: a romcom that, for once, has some major com to it. From the word go, in fact, as writer Deepu Pradeep and director Vipin Das magic three laughs before the title appears. First, everybody on screen finds that title - a reference to a Gretna Green-like temple that hosts populous family wedding ceremonies - impossible to get their mouths around. (Too many syllables - and if the locals struggle with it, we palefaces stand next to no chance.) Second: a superbly silly cutaway involving a motorcyclist only tangentially connected to the main plot. Third, and biggest: the suggestion that this will be a romcom where the bride-groom pairing matters far less than the relationship between the groom and his future brother-in-law. Ahead of his long-planned nuptials with the darling Anjali (Anaswara Rajan), genial beta Vinu (Basil Joseph) has been seeking life hacks and top bants that Anjali's burly alpha bro Anandan (Sukumaran, on what we might call full Affleckian form) has been only too happy to provide. The heavy implication is that Vinu may even have spent more time on the phone with Anandan than he has discussing future happiness with Anjali: as the characters' phone IDs flash up on screen, we note Vinu has entered a big red heart emoji next to Anandan's name. (And Anandan, for his part, has put two next to that of Vinu.) I love you, man: the two are so psyched to hear one another's voices and be in one another's company that becoming part of the same family seems a wholly welcome development. There's only one problem: they're also so in synch in their tastes and outlook it's almost no surprise when we learn the ex Vinu has been mooning over and cursing out is Anandan's on-off missus Parvathy (Nikhita Vimal).

Now: yes, it's a contrivance, and yes, surely this simple fact would have come up at least once in the boys' midnight-hour telephonic check-ins. But there is ground to be gained from swallowing it and cracking on, as the film does, making a decisive entry into one of the funniest of all subgenres: the Men Are Such Idiots comedy. Vinu makes his way to Parvathy's place in the hope of a reunion, love theme keening away in the background, only to be greeted at the front door with a bearhug from his clueless compadre. (The love theme persists.) The guys subsequently sit around trash-talking Vinu's ex, neither aware just who the other is talking about. Pradeep and Das get a lot of comic mileage from the sight and sound of men who are such idiots they're prepared to expend seemingly limitless energy and effort on blowing situations in which they would appear to have it made, up to and including trashing their own pre-existing relationships. Our (frequent) guffaws shouldn't distract us from the filmmakers' sure handling of what is a wildly complicated plot: Das has to resort to frantic crosscutting and split screen to get it all done and dusted in a shade over two hours, and for much of that duration, the fates of multiple hearts hang in the balance. The evidently suggestible Vinu is just idiot enough to waver upon encountering Parvathy again, and to employ his wastrel friends, who may have nothing more pressing or constructive to be getting on with, to sabotage the wedding party in the days leading up to the event. (One subversion, or perversion: it's a romcom where the bride and groom are mostly being prised apart.) The achievement of Das's direction is to carve out time amid all the tumult to check in with those feeling the knock-on effects: the women, who plainly deserve better men and lesser idiots than these, and the massed ranks of in-laws, most notably the huffy patriarch (Jagadish) who throws a disproportionate strop upon learning his precious protein powder has been baked into the wedding-party oatcakes. (Men are such idiots, and some of that idiocy is handed down to us.)

Yet the real triumph here may finally be attributable to Pradeep, and to a script where both the storytelling and gagwriting is of an uncommonly high standard. The title proves but the first of Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil's prolix, rat-a-tat jokes, only some of which have found their way into the otherwise excellent English subtitles. Here is a romcom so abundantly stocked with gags it can lose 15-to-20% of them in translation and still qualify as a tremendously fun night out. (If you speak the lingo, it may just be the funniest thing you'll have seen for a long while.) Of course, it all resolves at the wedding, a final reel that encompasses not just a standout musical number - a vision in pastel, indicating Das has an eye and ear to go with his funny bone - but the world's worst wedding photographers, a machina ex machina, and what looks like half of Kerala (most of them eating bananas, an inexplicably funny touch). Shot like an ambush in a Mob movie - or the spiralling funeral rites in Lijo Jose Pellissery's ee.ma.yau - it's seemingly chaos, and yet it's deftly controlled chaos, even contriving a resonantly satisfying hero moment for Prithviraj as Anandan realises he alone has the power to stop the nonsense and bring about the happy ending we all seek. (Men are such idiots, but some of us learn.) As with everything else, it's achieved with that casualness by which the Malayalam industry has made crackerjack entertainment look like the easiest thing in the world to pull off. The Hindi cinema, by contrast, has gone ominously quiet: it's election time, and there are box-office wounds to be licked. But I would hope its more open-minded creatives have themselves been watching this recent run of solid-gold crowdpleasers from the South - as remarkable, in its own way, as any number of European new waves - taking notes, and learning in turn. This, my friends, is how you pack 'em in, and how you get them coming back for more.

Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil is now playing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Yeelen"

Had the film industry originated in Africa - rather than mainland Europe or the west coast of America - it would obviously speak a different language, but would also have had a new set of myths to draw from and images with which to work. This probably explains why Souleymane Cissé's great 1987 film Yeelen remains as jolting as it does: for a little over an hour and a half, it offers nothing less than a portal into an alternative reality. Narratively, what we're watching could reasonably be described as a chase movie, and a power struggle between a crazed warlock and his estranged son, who's inherited some of dad's spellcasting but resolved to use it only for good. (Several introductory title cards recall the long scroll at the start of the first Star Wars, so we're not in a galaxy so very far, far away.) Yet the events that play out within this framework have been thought through and shot with an entirely fresh imagination. There are many more chickens being set on fire, for starters, but also: a whole new landscape to consider, from the caves the characters call home to the twisted, sawn-off trees marking the horizon and the parched flats underfoot; a midfilm pause for several rounds of millet beer (or Millet Lite, for those driving); a man in a hyena mask who may represent a trickster of some kind (i.e. just a man wearing a mask) or a fantastical creature (i.e. an actual talking hyena), and whose presence is all the more magical for going unexplained by a paragraph of exposition; and some sort of ritualised fight that involves the unarmed combatants pressing their foreheads together, like stags without antlers. Here is a film that, at every turn, illustrates how little the movies have thought to show us - and how much more of this world there is to explore and document.

In any English dictionary, mere inches separate mythic from mystification, and there are, granted, stretches here where the relative lack of contextualising information - Cissé's decision to toss the viewer headfirst into another culture - leaves us to puzzle out developments for ourselves. Most, however, lead to moments of brilliant clarity, as if a match had suddenly been struck before our very eyes. An example: the sequence where the son is pressganged into helping repel warriors from the village at which he's just arrived. It's something of a headscratcher that this process should involve a horse's shinbone, to be sundered, filled with sticks, bound with twine and then hammered into the ground - but, however we get there, either the hammering or the proximity of a foreign object looses a swarm of angry bees to be set on the invaders. Yeelen moves in comparably mysterious ways towards a final showdown between a man clutching a big log and a boy clutching a paddle with what now looks like an Infinity Stone at the end of it, and the payoff seems to connect back to the previous year's nuclear-themed The Sacrifice as much as The Empire Strikes Back. In an Afrocentric cinema, the conflicts and setpieces would be vastly more original, the reference points more diverse. For all that Yeelen belongs to a particular storytelling tradition, for all that it feels like a yarn passed down through a hundred generations or more, its words finally weigh less than Cissé's superlative images, which are burnished and handsome with regard to the people and the places they pass through, and richly unfamiliar with regard to what these people are doing there. Yes, many of these images require greater interpretation than those we've seen elsewhere, but the question to ask is not why the dog is walking backwards, but why can't the dog walk backwards? Why shouldn't the dog walk backwards? Why should our movies be bound by the same tired logic and rationale they've been bound by for well over a century now? Why can't the cinema, from time to time, go in a completely different direction?

Yeelen is now streaming via Rarefilmm.com.

On demand: "Vidas Secas"

The temptation is to frame 1963's Vidas Secas as a Brazilian Grapes of Wrath, as if writer-director Nelson Pereira dos Santos (adapting Graciliano Ramos) were confronting John Ford (adapting Steinbeck) before him. Wanna see a dustbowl? I'll show you a real dustbowl. A migrant family - mother, father, two children, dog - traipse across the barren flatlands, carrying their belongings (not much, all told), keeping eyes open for seasonal work, subsisting on handfuls of powder that may as well be sand. The sun beats down relentlessly. A pet parrot doesn't even make it out of the first five minutes alive, and barely seems worth barbequing, for all the meat it provides. Suffice to say, the Latin American experience of poverty proves altogether more bracing than its North American equivalent. For all the film's Cinema Novo credentials, for all that it translates the neo-realism of Bicycle Thieves to a more arid landscape yet, the prevailing editorial line is clear: how surreal it is that we allow our fellow man to live like this. Yet it doesn't have to be this way - and Vidas Secas owes its enduring classic status to dos Santos's alertness to resilient signs of life.

The dog chases after rodents (cuing some of world cinema's few canine POV shots); the buffoonish dad strains to pull his boots on and off; the dirt-smeared youngest treads proudly and defiantly in the old man's footsteps; the older child wraps his head around the idea of hell. It remains a struggle - particularly after dad falls foul of the law - and the genuinely infernal seems only ever a sunrise away. Yet the people filmed here are forever too busy and too spirited for Vidas Secas to slump listlessly into the realms of poverty porn. Instead, we are compensated with a richness of gesture and a real and rare compositional gift, the latter only the most visible illustration of the keenly cinematic intelligence at play. Where the father's landowner employer enjoys the playing of a professionally trained violinist, the family's progress is tracked by a single, unnervingly tenuous note of vibrato; and the closing stretch constructs a potent animals-only metaphor that predates Amores Perros by almost four decades. I wonder if one reason the film has dropped out of circulation in recent times is that the animals appear to suffer at least as much as the people trapped within these frames - but then any sentimentality would doubtless be considered a luxury hereabouts.

Vidas Secas is now streaming via Rarefilmm.com.

In memoriam: Dabney Coleman (Telegraph 19/05/24)

Dabney Coleman, who has died aged 92, was a comic actor renowned for his portrayal of blustering authority figures, typified by two choice early Eighties roles that sealed his image in the popular imagination: the corporate chauvinist outmanoeuvred by Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5 (1980) and the sexist, bottom-spanking director in Tootsie (1982).

Tall, balding and moustachioed, he became vulnerable to typecasting as an officious jerk – what fans called “the man you love to hate” – but Coleman always insisted he had no problems taking on such villainy: “I’ve played good guys and nice guys, but the truth is I’d rather be nasty than nice. The bad guys are always better written and more fun to play.”

He had been working in film and television for two decades before 9 to 5 pushed him into the limelight via the role of Franklin Hart Jr., vice president of the fictional Consolidated Companies – and living embodiment of every egregiously well-connected wretch to have occupied a corner office. “You’re a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot,” Fonda’s Judy tells him, amid the turning of tables. “So I have a few faults,” Hart smarmily shrugs. “Who doesn’t?”

Despite the fractious onscreen drama, the shoot was harmonious: “[My recollection] is how great all three of those girls were to me, because they were several steps up the ladder from where I was in my career. All of ‘em were well-established… And here’s this guy coming off late-night TV. All three of them went out of their way to make me feel equal. There’s no other way to put it. Status-wise and talent-wise, they all made me feel extremely secure and were very supportive.”

Fonda even invited Coleman to play her fiancé in her next film, a passion project titled On Golden Pond (1981): “She said, ‘Well, look, this is just gonna be a little movie, no one’s gonna make any money… We’re not paying anything big, but I just want to do this because I think my dad might have a shot at an Academy Award with this part.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t care what your motives are, but I definitely want to do this. I disagree with you, though. I think it’s gonna make a lot of money. I think it’s a great movie. But whether it does or not, I want to do this movie.’”

As Coleman recalled, the shoot was “one of the most touching experiences I’ve ever had”: “Because there were several people going through stuff on that film, including Jane and her dad, who were literally going through exactly what the script was about… [Director] Mark Rydell was going through a bad time, I was going through a bad time, marital-wise, as was one of the key crew guys, either the cameraman or the assistant director. It was a very, very sentimental set... But then, lo and behold, damned if we don’t see Jane and Henry connect for the first time in their lives.”

The reviews were glowing, in a qualified way. In The New York Times, Vincent Canby labelled it “American cheese”, while insisting “its stars add more than colour to this pasteurized product. On Golden Pond now has the bite of a good old cheddar.” The film ran away with the Christmas box office, and at the following March’s Oscars, Fonda senior did indeed win his first acting Oscar.

Coleman returned to more familiar comic territory for Tootsie, albeit in a different role to that originally envisaged. Screenwriters Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal had written the role of the crossdressing hero’s agent George Fields with Coleman in mind; yet after star Dustin Hoffman persuaded director Sydney Pollack to play Fields, Coleman was reassigned as the boorish onscreen director Ron Carlisle, who drives Jessica Lange’s actress Julie into the arms of Hoffman’s Michael.

By this point, Carlisle was a role Coleman could almost have played in his sleep, yet boosted by a behind-the-scenes array of comic savvy – including uncredited script contributions from Elaine May and Barry Levinson – the film became an even bigger hit than 9 to 5 and On Golden Pond put together, grossing $240m off a $21m budget; it was nominated for nine Oscars, with Lange the only winner on the night, but proved exactly the kind of zeitgeist-seizing project that boosts everybody’s visibility.

Including Coleman, who found himself set for a lengthy career playing the bloviating meanie, a persona he maintained was many leagues removed from his actual self: “I maintain that you have a head start playing the opposite of who you really are. Because you know what the opposite is. Somehow you know a little bit better. Especially if comedy is involved.”

Dabney Wharton Coleman was born in Austin, Texas on January 3, 1932, the youngest of four children to military veteran Melvin Coleman and his wife Mary (née Wharton). His father died of pneumonia shortly thereafter, although his influence continued to be felt. At 17, the young Dabney was packed off for two years of training at the Virginia Military Institute, followed by a spell in the US Marine Corps reserve, where he made lieutenant-colonel despite – by his own admission – using this European jaunt chiefly to play tennis.

He began studying law at the University of Texas, although a chance meeting with fellow Austinite turned Hollywood star Zachary Scott persuaded him to redirect his energies; the following day, Coleman flew out to New York to study under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. (Upon arrival, Meisner reportedly told him “You’re ideal for us. You’ve lived some.”)

He made his TV debut worrying about his waistline in a 1960 advertisement for Diet Delight canned fruit, before booking a role on crime anthology Naked City in 1961. Thereafter he was a beneficiary of American television’s tendency to recycle less recognisable actors: he played two different roles on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1963-64) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965-67), three on The Outer Limits (1964) and four on The Fugitive (1964-66).

His big-screen debut came alongside Sidney Poitier in The Slender Thread (1965), directed by a pre-Tootsie Sydney Pollack, himself debuting behind the camera: “He was my teacher at the Neighborhood Playhouse… and we had become fast friends after that. When I got out of school, I said, ‘I want to be in every movie you make’. And he said, ‘Okay’, and we got off to a pretty good start.” Further roles followed in Pollack’s The Scalphunters (1968), as Robert Redford’s ski coach in Downhill Racer (1969) and alongside Elvis in The Trouble with Girls (1969). 

Yet the Coleman persona arguably only cohered after he grew a pencil moustache for his role as a police sergeant in a 1973 episode of Columbo; thereafter, he found himself cast in authority roles with greater regularity. He was a fire chief in The Towering Inferno (1974), a young Murr Arnold in Midway (1976), a hissable politico – sign of things to come – on TV’s Mary Hartman (1976-77), a judge in Jonathan Demme’s cult comedy Melvin and Howard (1980), and the knowingly named religious huckster Marvin Fleece in Pray TV (1980).

Having established himself as a certain type, Coleman worked regularly through the 1980s and 90s. He earned his first Golden Globe nomination as the outspoken talk-show host Bill Bittinger on the well-reviewed but short-lived NBC sitcom Buffalo Bill (1983-84); he sportingly allowed the Muppets to run rings around him as a Broadway huckster in The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984); and he sparred with Tom Hanks in The Man with One Red Shoe (1985) and Dragnet (1987).

He won his one and only Emmy as a washed-up lawyer defending Liam Neeson’s serial killer in the based-on-true-events TV movie Sworn to Silence (1987), and was nominated again the following year for playing the old-school sportswriter hero of sitcom The Slap Maxwell Story (1987-88); he lost out to Family Ties’ Michael J. Fox, but consoled himself with the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a TV Series (Comedy/Musical).

Coleman fared less well on the big screen when playing leads: neither Where the Heart Is (1990), where he played a patriarch trying to teach his ingrate kids a lesson, nor Short Time (1990), a high-concept action-comedy about a detective trying to get himself killed for the insurance payout, took with the cinemagoing public.

Chastened but unbowed, he returned to supporting work, reuniting with Tomlin and Parton on the sputtering The Beverly Hillbillies (1993); he was the philandering dad in You’ve Got Mail (1998) and Chief Quimby in the live-action Inspector Gadget (1999); and he found a solid pension plan, voicing the principal in the Disney Channel animation Recess (1997-99) and its subsequent spinoffs.

Diagnosed with macular degeneration around the millennium, he shifted into television and immediately landed more shaded dramatic material. He was central to the success of the hit legal procedural The Guardian (2001-04), which he described as “absolutely brilliant, as good as any other 10 shows I’ve ever seen”; and he lent gravitas to the scheming Commodore on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (2010-2011), despite filming being interrupted so he could overcome throat cancer.

Away from the camera, Coleman kept up the tennis, winning many celebrity and charity tournaments; he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2014, and was the subject of the documentary Not Such a Bad Guy in 2017.

His last prominent role came with a poignant flashback in the second-season finale of the wildly popular Western Yellowstone (2018-present), advising onscreen son Kevin Costner as to the fate of the family ranch (“Don’t let ‘em take it away from you, son, not a goddamn inch”). Showrunner Taylor Sheridan, who’d acted alongside Coleman in The Guardian almost two decades before, told press: “He was such a gifted, giving actor and I was really struck by how good he was, and how kind he was to this kid who was guest starring on his deal.”

He married twice, to Ann Courtney Harrell and then the actress Jean Hale; both marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, and two daughters and a son from his second.

Dabney Coleman, born January 3, 1932, died May 16, 2024.

In memoriam: Mark Damon (Telegraph 18/05/24)

Mark Damon, who has died aged 91, enjoyed two bites at the Hollywood cherry, first as a toothy B-movie performer, then as a financier and producer of several worldwide hits, including Das Boot (1981) and The Lost Boys (1987). His company Producers Sales Organization rethought the way films were sold internationally, initiating the now-standard practice of pre-selling titles to foreign distributors based on creative personnel and advance publicity materials. The tactic – securing funds often before a single frame of film had been shot – proved a game-changing success; in 1983, PSO did more overseas business than any of the major American studios. 

As an actor, Damon was one of the many stolidly pretty figures underwriting the post-War studio system. Signed to Fox in 1958, he often “played handsome leads in inconsequential films”, as the biographer Ephraim Katz summarised. Yet he found more notable work outside his contract, winning the Golden Globe for Best Male Newcomer as Philip Winthrop in Roger Corman’s Poe adaptation The Fall of the House of Usher (1960). 

Upon moving to Italy in 1962, Damon – and his cerulean eyes, newly piercing in gaudy Eastmancolor – became a fixture of the emergent spaghetti Western genre. An agent blocked him from appearing in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), but he headlined Sergio Corbucci’s Ringo and His Golden Pistol (1966) and made an especially dastardly villain in Requiescant (1967). 

“I was surprised, because I had never ridden a horse in my life,” Damon later told an interviewer. “Cowboys had to be tall and blond, and I’m not that tall. I had very dark hair at the time, but they said, ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re American.’ I said OK and learned to ride a horse.” 

Yet Damon grew tired of typecasting, taking a job with an Italian distributor – “they really wanted me because they thought I knew everyone in Hollywood and could get them bigger pictures” – before returning to the US with a greater understanding of the hardscrabble involved in making low-budget pictures. 

His producing career began with the Pam Grier vehicle The Arena (1974), which bore the semi-irresistible tagline “See Wild Women Fight to The Death”. The rights for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) eluded him, but he assumed mogul status soon thereafter: Das Boot (1981) netted six Oscar nominations, while its director Wolfgang Petersen’s well-packaged follow-up, The NeverEnding Story (1984), yielded big box-office and a top ten pop hit.

Juggling such family fare with altogether more adult material, including 9½ Weeks (1986), Damon grasped what his legacy would be: “My claim to fame will be the fact that I basically […] became what they call the godfather of independent films… How did somebody do what I did? Because I didn’t know better. I came in with such a fresh viewpoint because I’d been an actor and didn’t know anything.” 

Damon was born Alan Harris on April 22, 1933 in Chicago, where his parents were grocers. A keen actor from his schooldays, he studied dentistry at UCLA – briefly rooming with Jack Nicholson – before switching courses, eventually emerging with a literature BA and an MA in business administration. He made his screen debut in a 1952 episode of true-crime compendium Gang Busters, and his feature debut in the union drama Inside Detroit (1956).

Much like Corman, whom he outlived by three days, he was both prolific and catholic in his tastes, negotiating deals for Zalman King’s Red Shoe Diaries (1992), the WW2 epic Stalingrad (1993) and Disney’s first live-action take on The Jungle Book (1995). Few projects achieved critical glory, although Monster (2003) landed Charlize Theron an Oscar for playing the serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

He worked well into his eighties, producing the Nicolas Cage actioner Willy’s Wonderland (2021), while his 2008 memoir From Cowboy to Mogul to Monster: The Neverending Story of Film Pioneer Mark Damon became a touchstone for independently minded creatives. Flexibility, he admitted, had been key to his success: “If you don’t succeed in the field of your dreams, you may one day succeed in the field you never dreamed of. That’s the story of my career.”

He is survived by his second wife, the actress Margaret Markov, and their two children; he was previously married to the actress Barbara Frey.

Mark Damon, born April 22, 1933, died May 12, 2024.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of May 10-12, 2024):

1 (new) Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (12A)

2 (1) The Fall Guy (12A) **

3 (3) Challengers (15) **

4 (4) Back to Black (15)

5 (6) Tarot (15)

6 (5) Kung Fu Panda 4 (PG)

7 (new) Nye - NT Live 2024 (15)

8 (new) La Chimera (15) ***

9 (new) Madama Butterfly - Met Opera 2023/24 (uncertificated)

10 (8) Love Lies Bleeding (15) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Kidnapped

2. Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil

3. Rome, Open City [above]

4. Shallow Grave

5. La Chimera

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Dune: Part Two (12) **

2 (new) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

3 (2) Kung Fu Panda 4 (PG)

4 (3) Migration (U)

5 (new) The Crow (15) ***

6 (8) The Iron Claw (15) ***

7 (5) The Equalizer 3 (15)

8 (4) Bob Marley: One Love (12)

9 (7) Wonka (PG) ***

10 (9) Oppenheimer (15) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. May December

2. Fallen Leaves

3. The Iron Claw

4. The Holdovers

5. The Three Musketeers: Part II - Milady

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Sunday, BBC2, 12noon)

2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Saturday, BBC2, 12.50am)

3. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Sunday, ITV1, 6am)

4. The Hate U Give (Monday, Channel 4, 12.55am)

5. Dr. No (Sunday, ITV1, 2.25pm and Friday, ITV1, 11.15pm) 

Jugheads: "La Chimera"

Perhaps it should come with a trigger warning for magical realism, that most variably realised and take-or-leave of forms. Alice Rohrwacher's often magical 2018 film Happy as Lazzaro concluded with a character casually strolling out of the past and into the present day, some indication that the boundaries in Rohrwacher country are nothing if not porous. The writer-director's follow-up La Chimera heads even more forcefully in that same direction. We're in something like the 1970s now, and back in the Italian countryside, where superstitions, myths and legends have taken deep root in the soil, alongside the remnants of earlier civilisations. Going in search of the latter: Englishman Arthur (Josh O'Connor), a funny, shambling sort of mastermind whom we find returning to these fields after serving jail time for smuggling antiquities onto the black market. He returns unchanged in everything from his moral outlook to his grimy white linen suit - apparel that, like much else hereabouts, has clearly seen better days. Reuniting his crew of oddballs, he begins plotting his next heist - not on a museum or bank vault, but the bounteous earth itself, a process that involves divining with sticks while his crew congregate con molto anticipazione in his footsteps. To the last man, they're a confounding bunch: a Fellini wet dream, and doubtless a nightmare for others. For not unlike her recidivist diviner hero, Rohrwacher is herself testing the ground beneath her feet, seeing how far she can push what she does. That La Chimera debuted on the UK Top Ten - and was still playing to a packed house as I caught up with it on its second weekend - would indicate the filmmaker has been successful in at least some part of her enquiries; yet it also struck this viewer as highlighting the risks with this particular aesthetic, chiefly how porous the boundary is between genuine screen magic, a rapt ensorcelment, and at least semi-resistible whimsy.

Much of La Chimera represents the wesandersonification of Rohrwacher, the point at which previously organic, fabular storytelling takes a turn for the self-consciously quirky and infantile. (Possibly with an eye to capturing the infantilised hearts and minds of the mass audience.) Happy as Lazzaro's characters appeared carved from the landscapes they inhabited or passed through, as if out of stone; this shower, by contrast, are largely defined by their wardrobe choices. Arthur's suit; some retro leisurewear; a Steve Zissou-like woolly hat; a rakish moustache. They wouldn't necessarily have had to be authentic depictions of the Italian proletariat during the Years of Lead, but these figures forever feel more doodled than written or embodied, cut out of cardboard with safety scissors, filled in only with felt tips, added to the frame as a creative afterthought. It's possible O'Connor was cast specifically for his jug-like ears: they rhyme, not unamusingly, with some of the trophies he seeks, and render Arthur immediately recognisable in silhouette, like Bart Simpson. (Where Anderson turns to Tilda Swinton and her swelling prop box, Rohrwacher casts her own sister Alba as a mercenary antiquities dealer in a shameless canary-yellow jumpsuit.) The absence of depth and shade means that no matter how hard, far or wide the gang digs, the film remains stranded at surface level; these characters can't affect us any more than, say, the Hair Bear Bunch or the Ant Hill Mob. Arthur demonstrates some maturing of taste - a late-in-the-day appreciation for the beauty of statues, as distinct from their market value - but mostly spends the movie getting grubbier and grubbier. (O'Connor looks like a child who's raided his dad's closet for playtime; you spend much of the film wanting to take a spit-dampened tissue to his ever-mucky chops.) The squabbles among his entourage are often comical, but also negligible, and not really enough to sustain a film of 135 minutes. As sunny summer diversion, La Chimera still has a lot going for it: gorgeous scenery, excellent weather, fine mosaics; resonant images, lovely faded pastel colours, a nice wistful, dreamy mood. It's an easy sell, which is probably why it's been the critical and commercial hit it is. Yet it's also the first Rohrwacher film I've seen where you have to look past the people for fullest enjoyment, which isn't the development one was seeking at this stage in her career.

La Chimera is now playing in selected cinemas.